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think, justly, in spite of Mr. Fergusson, the great architec- 
tural critic — to these people, such as those at Stonehenge, 
Avebury, Callernish, and Stennis ; but nothing of the kind 
exists in Yorkshire. Their dwellings appear, from what is 
left of them, to have been humble edifices indeed. A low 
wall, never above three feet high, encloses a circular space 
of from fifteen to thirty feet in diameter ; upon this wall has 
been raised a conical roof of balks of timber, covered with 
turf or thatch : this seems to have been their ordinary habita- 
tion. In some cases a stone bench runs round the inside of 
the wall, and there is generally a hearth-stone in the centre, 
the smoke no doubt escaping through the roof.* "We find 
nothing like the beehive houses, or the underground chambers 
which exist in many parts of Scotland, nor like the somewhat 
similar buildings such as are seen in Cornwall. It seems 
strange that people who had attained to such high perfection 
in metal manufacture, and who decorated such things as horse 
trappings in the artistic and skilful way which the Britons 
did, should have been satisfied to live in such, to us, wretched 
habitations. !No remains of any better dwellings have, how- 
ever, been discovered ; and they would, I think, have been 
found if any had ever existed ; the more so because we find 
such numerous foundations of the circular huts, and there is 
no reason why they should have remained, and that all traces 
of better buildings should have disappeared. "We have also 
in the county of Durham a cave — dark, damp, and dismal — 
* A fine example of these hut circles remains quite untouched by cultivation, 
close by an entrance through the Scamridge Dikes, near Ebberston, evidently the 
habitations of the persoDs who guarded that entrance. Another, and perhaps in 
the North -Riding a commoner form of the same kind of habitation, is a circular 
pit, about five to seven feet deep, and varying, like the hut circles, in diameter. 
These are sometimes Lined with stones, and have been probably covered by a 
flatter roof than those huts whose foundations were above the ground. They 
exist in groups both of an irregular form and arranged in rows, and frequently, 
as is also the case with the hut circles, they are surrounded by a low mound, 
apparently for defence. 
